In its short history, Internet usage has been mainly driven by portals and search engines, such as Yahoo! and Google. Recently, the rapid growth of social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, has revealed a new trend of Internet usage. Social networking generally relates to services and tools that help users maintain and expand their circles of friends usually by exploiting existing relationships. Social networking sites have shown potential to become the places on the Internet where many people spend most of their time, thus making these sites the main entry point for online activity. Often times, these social networking sites can become the focal point of sharing information, such as links, multimedia, music, and the like.
In general, social networking sites and other online services of the Internet offer a mix of features and tools, such as message boards, games, journals or web logs (“blogs”). Many of these sites try to build communities around multi-media or popular culture, such as television, film, music, etc. These sites and their features are designed to keep users clicking on advertising-supported pages of the site. Thus, the known social networking sites employ a closed platform of services that attempt to keep their user-base captive to the site.
One of the popular features of many social networking sites is the sharing of images and photographs. A large number of sites, such as Flickr, are now available on the Internet to allow people to share photos with each other.
Unfortunately, these photo sharing sites still attempt to employ captive techniques that prevent open sharing of photos. Therefore, users who have accounts with different photo hosting sites have difficulty sharing these photos.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide methods and systems that serve as an open platform for users to automatically construct and share an album of photographs with their social network.